Five ways Congress should improve the copyright system

In a Wednesday speech, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) announced plans for a "comprehensive review" of copyright law. The announcement is significant because Goodlatte chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over copyright issues.

"I am announcing today that the House Judiciary Committee will hold a comprehensive series of hearings on US copyright law in the months ahead," Goodlatte said. "The goal of these hearings will be to determine whether the laws are still working in the digital age. I welcome all interested parties to submit their views and concerns to the Committee."

Goodlatte cited recent comments by Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante as an inspiration for his initiative. And he drew a parallel to work by one of Pallante's predecessors, Thorvald Solberg, which culminated in a major overhaul of copyright law in 1909.

So here are five suggestions for improving copyright law that Congress ought to consider. These ideas may be more ambitious than Goodlatte has in mind, but dramatic changes are needed if we want the copyright system to truly promote, rather than hinder, creativity.

Bring proportionality back to copyright penalties

Over the last three decades, Congress has repeatedly increased the penalties for copyright infringement. As a result, copyright infringement is now punishable by as much as $150,000 per work.

These disproportionate penalties have had devastating consequences for both individuals and businesses. A decade ago, the threat of having to pay as much as $150,000 per work forced the pioneering locker service MP3.com to settle its lawsuit with major labels before it had a chance to appeal.

Single mother Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been fighting six-figure penalties for close to a decade in one of the few file-sharing cases to make it into a courtroom. She is accused of sharing just 24 songs, which have a retail value of around $24.

And the threat of astronomical damages has been a potent weapon in the hands of copyright trolls like Prenda Law. Prenda's Paul Duffy pointed to the $222,000 verdict against Thomas-Rasset as a cautionary tale in his communications with alleged infringers.

Penalties for copyright infringement are appropriate, but the punishment should fit the crime. The current penalties are at least an order of magnitude too large.

Rein in asset forfeiture in copyright cases

In January 2012, the federal government froze the worldwide assets of file-sharing site Megaupload and its founder, Kim Dotcom. The operation was made possible by the 2008 PRO-IP Act, which for the first time gave the government broad authority to use the power of civil asset forfeiture in copyright cases.

The seizures amounted to a corporate death sentence for Megaupload. With no cash, the firm was forced to lay off its employees. Legitimate users who relied on the service suddenly lost access to their data with no recourse.

Dotcom hasn't been the only target of copyright-related asset seizures. In 2010, the government seized a hip-hop blog called Dajaz1, holding it for almost a year before finally returning it. Evidently, the government didn't have a case against its owner.

Dajaz1 was just one of hundreds of domain names seized by the government over the last three years as part of "Operation In Our Sites." While many of these sites do appear to have been engaged in illegal activities, it's troubling that the government has the power to shut them down before their owners have any opportunity to defend themselves.

Megaupload may be guilty of copyright infringement, but the firm should have had its day in court before having its assets seized and its site shut down. The operator of Dajaz1 should have had a chance to respond to the government's accusations before losing control of his site.

Pre-conviction asset seizures may be appropriate in conventional piracy cases where, for example, the government finds a warehouse full of pirated DVDs. But the tactic is simply too crude a weapon to use against websites and online services.

Reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Modern music software such as iTunes has long included a feature to rip your CD collection onto your computer. Yet almost two decades after DVDs were introduced, legal software to rip them is not available.

The difference is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress passed in 1998. It criminalizes circumvention of copy protection schemes like the Content Scrambling System found on DVDs. The result has been stunted progress in digital media technologies. Firms that have tried to develop innovative technology related to the DVD without the permission of the DVD cartel have faced ruinous lawsuits.

Even worse, the DMCA has been wielded to limit user freedom in areas that have no plausible connection to piracy. In 2012, the Librarian of Congress sparked outrage when it changed DMCA-related regulations to effectively make it illegal to unlock a cell phone in order to take it to another carrier. In another case, Blizzard used the DMCA to shut down the use of a World of Warcraft bot.

Recently, some members of Congress have proposed narrow legislation to legalize cell phone unlocking. But the deeper problem is the DMCA's anti-circumvention rule itself. Congress should narrow the DMCA's restrictions on circumvention, and should consider repealing the provisions altogether.

Reduce copyright terms

America's original copyright system granted authors 14 years of protection with the option to renew for an additional 14 years. By the mid-20th Century, that had been expanded to a 28-year initial term and another 28 years after renewal. But since 1976, we've been in an era of perpetual copyrights. Congress added 20 years to older works and changed the term for new works to the life of the author plus 50 years. In 1998, Congress retroactively extended copyright terms by another 20 years.

As a result, the public domain has been practically frozen for forty years. If a work was under copyright in 1978, it will probably still be under copyright in 2018.

It's a virtual certainty that major copyright holders will seek yet another extension of copyright terms before 2018. Congress should not only refuse to grant another extension, but it should consider reducing the terms already in effect. Copyright protections that last more than a century are far more than are necessary to accomplish copyright's function of encouraging creativity.

Create a mandatory database of copyrighted works

For most of the 20th century, getting copyright protection for a work required marking it with a copyright notice and registering it with the Library of Congress. Authors also had to renew their works after 28 years in order to keep copyright protection.

But starting in 1976, Congress eliminated these requirements, known as "formalities." Today, almost everything you write—your emails, your diary, and sketches you draw on cocktail napkins—are copyrighted, whether you want them to be or not. And that protection could last for more than a century with no renewal requirement.

The result has been a huge "orphan works" problem. Thousands of books, films, and other works created in the mid-20th Century are deteriorating on our library shelves. Digitization and republication could give these works a second lease on life, but doing so is legally hazardous because no one can figure out who holds the copyrights. The problem will only get worse as works published after 1978 start to show their age. These works may not even have a copyright notice to identify their authors.

One argument for eliminating the registration and renewal requirements was that they created too much of a burden for authors. But registration need not be burdensome in the age of the Internet. Registration could be done online and the Librarian of Congress could charge a nominal fee such as $1. Renewal could be as simple as logging into the Librarian of Congress's website and updating an author's contact information—the Librarian of Congress could even send out helpful e-mail reminders when a work comes up for renewal.

Congress should once again require registration as a pre-condition of copyright protection and periodic renewal to keep copyright protection in effect. That would allow the Library of Congress to build a national database of copyrighted works. People who wanted to use older works would either be able to use the database to identify a work's owners, or to verify that the work has fallen into the public domain and was free for anyone to copy.

Timothy B. Lee
Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times. Emailtimothy.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@binarybits

I disagree with the last of the points Ars is making: the desirability of creating a mandatory database of copyrighted works.

To give a simple example, I write articles for my blog. Probably no one reads them, but I write them anyway. I would prefer if publishers had to ask me before reprinting those articles (anyone? I'd be happy to work something out!). I take pictures -- mostly for my own enjoyment. I wouldn't really mind if someone wanted to use my pictures as illustrations in their PowerPoint presentation, but I'd kind of like to know about it.

Copyright law allows me to do these things. I can share my pictures on a website so friends and family can see them and use a Creative Commons license so anyone can use them but they need to credit me. I can allow publication of my blog articles in a professional journal only on terms I agree to (really, folks: I'd pretty much ask for just a by-line!).

But under your proposal, I would need to register my copyrights to do these things, and I would need to pay something for it. Do you remember when film cost money? How you always thought twice before snapping? And today you just click away, hoping that one in a hundred of your pictures turn out well (I'm a lousy photographer). Imagine paying $1 for every picture, just so others won't be allowed to copy it. I'm opposed to this suggestion.

While I agree with suggestions made in the article, the pessimist in me doesn't see all that much change. It's pretty much a given that our government, particularly Congress, is in the pockets of lobbyists who's interests pretty much trump those of the people. The RIAA/MPAA and affiliated industries simply pump too much money into various political entities in order to stifle any real and meaningful reform. It's a pretty sad state of affairs all the way around.

I would add to this list that there be a mandatory "copyright cartel pays my lawyer fees if they lose or file maliciously against me" clause enacted to protect the little guys from being bullied by large corporations. He with the deepest pockets should not be the only one able to get justice in this country. Sadly it is often cheaper to settle up than to fight litigation.

Copyright terms will continue to be extended until Disney ceases to exist. Rather depressing, no? 2/3 generations from now, copyright will be life of the author plus 150+ years, effectively destroying the progress of the arts and science.

These are great ideas, and the article does have some encouraging news. My big question here is, what can we do as private citizens?

I know if you happen to be a constituent of one of the members of that committee you could write/call your representative and voice concerns directly. How about the rest of us though? He called for feedback from "interested parties." I am fairly certain the entertainment industry will submit hundreds of pages of legalese from their lawyers and results handpicked from studies they specifically paid for to get the data they want. What can I do, as a person not directly employed by or working in an industry that has large copyright interest? (But should, software shouldn't be patent able, just copyright able, but that's a different argument.) I'm not in a state represented by any of the committee members much less jurisdiction. I do want copyright to be refined so that consumption based abusers can be punished properly versus with vast overkill, works are protected long enough to encourage more and return some of the investment, and people can share the media that shaped them with their kids, or grand kids at least, without fear of repercussions.

Maybe an addendum to this article with better information on how to be part of this process?

I have over 400 images over two sites. Admittedly, I'm not that great of an artist, so the likelihood of them being used is virtually nil. Still, that's $400+ to make sure that I retain the copyright of those images, and I have to register any images before I put them online to make sure that others don't just download it and stick it on a t-shirt (again, the odds of that happening are nil, but it's the principle of the thing and paranoia is funny like that.)

Imagine what would happen to sites like DeviantArt (which for all the crap in it, has a lot of good stuff) and Conceptart.org. Artists in the know would simply stop posting their finished works or at all because of the possibility that their images would be used without permission, unless they went through this process each time.

I'm not saying that part of copyright doesn't need to change, but perhaps limiting automatic copyright to paintings, photographs, drawings, prose, poetry, and other types of art would be better than getting rid of it entirely.

Copyright does not reduce sales. If there was no copyright people would not have to pay the author because they could just acquire a copy for free. The problem illustrated by those links is that making it difficult to legally buy or discover content reduces sales.

Artists would not thank you for getting rid of it completely because they would not get much money from it. The reprinting of books from the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money does not go to the authors. It goes to the people who reprint the books.

Edited to make it more clear I meant the current sales of old books rather than the actual sales from the 1800s.

Better to provide much more limited protection to unregistered works. If the author doesn't think it's worth $1 to register it, the maximum amount obtainable in civil settlement in respect of unauthorised use should be limited to e.g. $100 for up to 1000 copies or $1000 for up to a million.

While I, for one, would like to see a shorter copyright term and mandatory registration, there is one big problem with that: WIPO and the associated Berne Convention. The latter, in particular, requires automatic copyright registration and terms of life + 50 years for works at a minimum, and mere membership in the World Trade Organization essentially requires acceptance of the Berne Convention via TRIPS. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that the United States could possibly reform its copyright laws in that direction, since it would require substantial international negotiations completely turned around from their trajectory to date, or US withdrawal from a number of significant treaties and international organizations created in no small part due to American influence, however nice such reform might be in theory.

Another issue with such a reform is the issue of moral rights for authors. Much of the Berne Convention implicitly accepts these as a given, and in a number of European countries these are a foundation of the copyright system. As can be seen in many of the previous posts, such as awarnock's or mcherm's, for authors and artists there is usually some conception that they have some rights over their own works regardless of the law (I would say as a matter of courtesy, but my personal views are not really relevant). Moral rights imply in particular automatic lifetime copyright, given that by definition they consist of the rights an author ought to have (by some definition of "ought") over his or her own works. All of Ars' proposals, on the other hand, are implicitly founded on the Anglosphere conception of copyright as a grant made by government to promote the creation of new works. As noted above, because copyright law is essentially internationalized presently (and has been since the late 19th century, to all effects and purposes, although the United States did not join Berne until the 1980s), this means that there will be some difficulties involved in bridging the gap, so to speak, between the two points of view.

Quote:

Artists would not thank you for getting rid of it completely because they would not get much money from it. The sales of books in the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money did not go to the authors. It went to the people who reprinted the books.

Well yes, the money is going to the reprinters, because the authors are a little dead presently (the graph is showing the number of books being reprinted now from each of those decades for purchase on Amazon, not the number of books being published then)

I would add some sort of "orphan works" licensing rules. Essentially, a person/company submits a sworn statement that they have made a reasonable attempt to identify the author of a particular work and were unable to do so. They then pay a license fee to the Library of Congress for their specific use of the work. The true owner of the copyright has 5 years to claim the fees collected by the LoC. The 5 year period begins the day the 1st license fee is collected, regardless of how many licenses are granted under this system. After a the 5 period of collecting fees, the "orphan work" enters the public domain. If the author comes forward, then they can assert their copyright as normal for all future requests.

Essentially, it is a system to identify orphaned works, let the be used immediately, and only continue under typical copyright protection is the real owner makes themselves known.

Artists would not thank you for getting rid of it completely because they would not get much money from it. The sales of books in the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money did not go to the authors. It went to the people who reprinted the books.

Well yes, the money is going to the reprinters, because the authors are a little dead presently (the graph is showing the number of books being reprinted now from each of those decades for purchase on Amazon, not the number of books being published then)

Even if the authors were alive the money would still not be going to them. I don't know why you thought I misunderstood the graph. It's obviously the number of books being offered now.

This proposal sound reasonable, like it was written by sane man. What are you, a communist?

Yeah, I don't see any heinous money-grabs, or attempts to create an impenetrable legal thicket to defend an empire of businessmen in their exploitation of the arts and sciences in order to horde absurd amounts of ill-gotten gains? How are we supposed to get rich by not actually contributing something back to society?

That... that's just not how we do things around here. What kind of American are you???

While I, for one, would like to see a shorter copyright term and mandatory registration, there is one big problem with that: WIPO and the associated Berne Convention. The latter, in particular, requires automatic copyright registration and terms of life + 50 years for works at a minimum, and mere membership in the World Trade Organization essentially requires acceptance of the Berne Convention via TRIPS. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that the United States could possibly reform its copyright laws in that direction, since it would require substantial international negotiations completely turned around from their trajectory to date, or US withdrawal from a number of significant treaties and international organizations created in no small part due to American influence, however nice such reform might be in theory.

Another issue with such a reform is the issue of moral rights for authors. Much of the Berne Convention implicitly accepts these as a given, and in a number of European countries these are a foundation of the copyright system. As can be seen in many of the previous posts, such as awarnock's or mcherm's, for authors and artists there is usually some conception that they have some rights over their own works regardless of the law (I would say as a matter of courtesy, but my personal views are not really relevant). Moral rights imply in particular automatic lifetime copyright, given that by definition they consist of the rights an author ought to have (by some definition of "ought") over his or her own works. All of Ars' proposals, on the other hand, are implicitly founded on the Anglosphere conception of copyright as a grant made by government to promote the creation of new works. As noted above, because copyright law is essentially internationalized presently (and has been since the late 19th century, to all effects and purposes, although the United States did not join Berne until the 1980s), this means that there will be some difficulties involved in bridging the gap, so to speak, between the two points of view.

Quote:

Artists would not thank you for getting rid of it completely because they would not get much money from it. The sales of books in the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money did not go to the authors. It went to the people who reprinted the books.

Well yes, the money is going to the reprinters, because the authors are a little dead presently (the graph is showing the number of books being reprinted now from each of those decades for purchase on Amazon, not the number of books being published then)

Several of my ideas would require re-negotiating various international agreements. But those agreements were largely put in place at the urging of the US government. In my hypothetical universe where Congress was actually interested in improving the copyright system, it would also be willing to use the same political clout it put into enacting those treaties into revising them.

At a minimum, the terms need to be greatly reduced. Having near 100 year terms is frankly ridiculous. I think 20 years for works of fiction and 10 years for works of nonfiction ought to be more than sufficient enticement for content creators. If you cannot make a decent return in those time frames, maybe it wasn't that good to begin with. Same with patents. I think 10 years is plenty.

Artists would not thank you for getting rid of it completely because they would not get much money from it. The sales of books in the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money did not go to the authors. It went to the people who reprinted the books.

Well yes, the money is going to the reprinters, because the authors are a little dead presently (the graph is showing the number of books being reprinted now from each of those decades for purchase on Amazon, not the number of books being published then)[/quote]

In the first half of the 19th century, authors had to sell their books to "libraires", bookshopkeepers also acting as publishers. Belgian printers were (in)famous for "stealing" successful works and selling for their own profit. Many French authors were enraged by this practice, as their private letters show.

And you're clearly implying there that not enough of them do it so we need copyrights but you're wrong, enough of them do, and we don't need them.

Currently people know they need to buy things because they are not legally allowed to just copy stuff. So most of them do it especially when it is made easy to find and buy.

If there was no copyright at all then people would learn that they don't need to buy things and then most of them would not. There would still be a lot of people who buy things specifically to support the authors but I doubt it would be the majority of people.

Even if the authors were alive the money would still not be going to them. I don't know why you thought I misunderstood the graph. It's obviously the number of books being offered now.

Because you said,

Quote:

The sales of books in the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money did not go to the authors. It went to the people who reprinted the books.

That's past tense and implies you were talking about the sale of books in the 1800s, not the sale of books in the 21st century. It's not particularly surprising that I would misinterpret you as referring to the events that led to the creation of the Berne Convention in the first place.

And as far as the authors are concerned, I'm not sure why we should not try to balance their interests with the interests of readers (listeners, watchers...) Clearly the latter matter too, and reasonable people can reasonably think that the present copyright system is balanced too far away from their interests. And even with the proposed copyright terms, there's plenty of time for a genuinely good or popular work to make money before it goes into the public domain. Most authors (painters, photographers...) aren't going to create works that only become popular fifty years later or after they're dead, after all; they'll either get popular right away or fade into obscurity.

@Tim Lee: Fair enough, although the Berne Convention in particular had very little US involvement in its initial negotiations (US publishers were profiting too much by pirating European works). See ellipse, for instance.

Even if the authors were alive the money would still not be going to them. I don't know why you thought I misunderstood the graph. It's obviously the number of books being offered now.

Because you said,

Quote:

The sales of books in the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money did not go to the authors. It went to the people who reprinted the books.

That's past tense and implies you were talking about the sale of books in the 1800s, not the sale of books in the 21st century. It's not particularly surprising that I would misinterpret you as referring to the events that led to the creation of the Berne Convention in the first place.

You're right. I should have put "from the 1800s" instead of "in the 1800s" and fixed the past tense.

I disagree with the last of the points Ars is making: the desirability of creating a mandatory database of copyrighted works.

To give a simple example, I write articles for my blog. Probably no one reads them, but I write them anyway. I would prefer if publishers had to ask me before reprinting those articles (anyone? I'd be happy to work something out!). I take pictures -- mostly for my own enjoyment. I wouldn't really mind if someone wanted to use my pictures as illustrations in their PowerPoint presentation, but I'd kind of like to know about it.

Copyright law allows me to do these things. I can share my pictures on a website so friends and family can see them and use a Creative Commons license so anyone can use them but they need to credit me. I can allow publication of my blog articles in a professional journal only on terms I agree to (really, folks: I'd pretty much ask for just a by-line!).

But under your proposal, I would need to register my copyrights to do these things, and I would need to pay something for it. Do you remember when film cost money? How you always thought twice before snapping? And today you just click away, hoping that one in a hundred of your pictures turn out well (I'm a lousy photographer). Imagine paying $1 for every picture, just so others won't be allowed to copy it. I'm opposed to this suggestion.

For the record, I am 100% behind all of the other recommendations.

You wouldn't pay $1 for EVERY snapshot. Only the ones that you considered good enough to rate protecting. The same would apply to your blog and every other piece of writing. If YOU think it rates protection, you pay for it to be protected at a very reasonable rate. This keeps a lot of silly stuff from being copyrighted. I would propose that a slightly larger fee might be implemented for something like a blog - you pay something like $10 a year, and everything published in your blog during that period would be covered by the copyright. A news site would pay even more, but again keep it reasonable. The purpose if the fee is not to keep people from registering their works, but to allow individuals to decide whether their work is really worth the nominal copyright protection cost or not. Note 1. The copyright is not just for that year, but for whatever period that congress sets for copyright - 14 years or 100 years. Note 2 - if you post those snapshots on your blog then they would all automatically be covered in the blog copyright fee along with everything else there. So the blog would have to be limited somehow to keep cheaters from posting a full encyclopedia as a blog.

While I, for one, would like to see a shorter copyright term and mandatory registration, there is one big problem with that: WIPO and the associated Berne Convention. The latter, in particular, requires automatic copyright registration and terms of life + 50 years for works at a minimum, and mere membership in the World Trade Organization essentially requires acceptance of the Berne Convention via TRIPS. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that the United States could possibly reform its copyright laws in that direction, since it would require substantial international negotiations completely turned around from their trajectory to date, or US withdrawal from a number of significant treaties and international organizations created in no small part due to American influence, however nice such reform might be in theory.

Another issue with such a reform is the issue of moral rights for authors. Much of the Berne Convention implicitly accepts these as a given, and in a number of European countries these are a foundation of the copyright system. As can be seen in many of the previous posts, such as awarnock's or mcherm's, for authors and artists there is usually some conception that they have some rights over their own works regardless of the law (I would say as a matter of courtesy, but my personal views are not really relevant). Moral rights imply in particular automatic lifetime copyright, given that by definition they consist of the rights an author ought to have (by some definition of "ought") over his or her own works. All of Ars' proposals, on the other hand, are implicitly founded on the Anglosphere conception of copyright as a grant made by government to promote the creation of new works. As noted above, because copyright law is essentially internationalized presently (and has been since the late 19th century, to all effects and purposes, although the United States did not join Berne until the 1980s), this means that there will be some difficulties involved in bridging the gap, so to speak, between the two points of view.

Quote:

Artists would not thank you for getting rid of it completely because they would not get much money from it. The sales of books in the 1800s that looks so impressive? The money did not go to the authors. It went to the people who reprinted the books.

Well yes, the money is going to the reprinters, because the authors are a little dead presently (the graph is showing the number of books being reprinted now from each of those decades for purchase on Amazon, not the number of books being published then)

The thing about the copyright treaties is that almost all of them force laws that are uncontitutional, but nobody in our government has bothered to point that out. In fact, much of our current copyright law is unconstitutional, but, again, nobody will speak up and point that out.

The thing about the chart from Amazon is that it's not about who got paid, it's about what books are still available and copyright has greatly reduced the number of titles available from the 30's to the 90's. Copyright is stifling access to useful works, which is antithetical to the stated purpose of copyright "to promote the progress". It's not very progressive if most books that aren't currently popular are scarce because copyright doesn't allow reprinting without the permission of a dead or disinterested author. If these books aren't making money, they simply don't continue to print them. That's a huge problem IMO. Huge swaths of our culture (such as old celluloid films rotting in vaults unpreserved) are disappearing into the ether because copyright gives rights holders the power to prevent the archiving and preservation of content that defines our culture. Copyright is making our culture fade away.

my take on how to fix copyright - split it in 2. Primary and Secondary copyright.

Primary Copyright is owned and cannot be transferred (like moral rights in other countries). it is also limited to something reasonable like 25 years.

Secondary copyright can be thought of as "licensing copyright" in that it governs the terms for works made by licensing the copyright from someone else. much shorter term of 12 years since the entire purpose is "license this now in order to profit". You then make that profit, and you are done.

I agree with mcherm and awarnock that automatic copyright is a wonderful thing for individual creators and we should absolutely not go back to requiring registration before a work is covered under copyright. And farva beat me to the point that the best way to deal with orphaned works it to make all works subject to statutory license when/if they go out of print and have the copyright office accept escrow payments when the owner cannot be contacted or when ownership is disputed. Any payments that are unclaimed by the time the copyright expires can be used to fund the federal endowment for the arts, and other such programs.

After reading this I felt happy and optimistic. Then I remembered that it would require an act of congress, and sadly those seem to occur with roughly the same frequency as acts of god. Makes for a wonderful Utopian fantasy though!

On a serious note I think that these suggestions are probably the best thought out ones I have seen to date. The current system has far too many negative externalities to justify its current state, but I don't think it would be appropriate to eliminate the concept altogether. As a creator of intellectual property I would not be terribly happy if someone could steal from me with impunity, but I don't think my great-great-grandchildren should die before my IP does.

One other note: agree with the concern voiced above regarding paying into the database. It would unfairly hit those arts where you produce many small works, such as photography, blogging, or web-comics.

Currently people know they need to buy things because they are not legally allowed to just copy stuff. So most of them do it especially when it is made easy to find and buy.

If there was no copyright at all then people would learn that they don't need to buy things and then most of them would not. There would still be a lot of people who buy things specifically to support the authors but I doubt it would be the majority of people.

People aren't that dumb. They already know that if you want something to continue existing you have to fund it. In fact we see time and again that the most prolific 'piraters' of content overlap significantly with the most prolific buyers of content. The situation we're in today is that people know they can get free copies and the ones that get the most free copies choose to pay more than anyone else.

Furthermore plenty of examples currently exist where the majority of people pay nothing and the entire community is supported by a subset of consumers who do elect to pay, a sort of benefactor class. F2P games work entirely on this model, just as an example.

While I don't agree 100% with the suggestions of the article, it is still far more reasoned than any of the current body of law. I would be happy if laws were reformed exactly as suggested in the article. It would be far better than what we're stuck with today.

The current system seems so obviously coerced by media conglomerate lobbyists, that I am baffled that there hasn't been more of a public backlash. Yet here we are, a society clearly brainwahsed into the current status quo in regard to intellectual "property".

Several of my ideas would require re-negotiating various international agreements. But those agreements were largely put in place at the urging of the US government. In my hypothetical universe where Congress was actually interested in improving the copyright system, it would also be willing to use the same political clout it put into enacting those treaties into revising them.

Both of those points are highly questionable.

Hell, the US didn't implement (and arguably has never fully implemented) the moral rights provisions in Berne properly for decades. How can it have driven it?

Several of my ideas would require re-negotiating various international agreements. But those agreements were largely put in place at the urging of the US government. In my hypothetical universe where Congress was actually interested in improving the copyright system, it would also be willing to use the same political clout it put into enacting those treaties into revising them.

Because it would require renegotiating those treaties, that is why we won't see the comprehensive changes that copyright needs. As for the DMCA it is too broken to fix, just get rid of it.

I disagree with the last of the points Ars is making: the desirability of creating a mandatory database of copyrighted works.

To give a simple example, I write articles for my blog. Probably no one reads them, but I write them anyway. I would prefer if publishers had to ask me before reprinting those articles (anyone? I'd be happy to work something out!). I take pictures -- mostly for my own enjoyment. I wouldn't really mind if someone wanted to use my pictures as illustrations in their PowerPoint presentation, but I'd kind of like to know about it.

Copyright law allows me to do these things. I can share my pictures on a website so friends and family can see them and use a Creative Commons license so anyone can use them but they need to credit me. I can allow publication of my blog articles in a professional journal only on terms I agree to (really, folks: I'd pretty much ask for just a by-line!).

But under your proposal, I would need to register my copyrights to do these things, and I would need to pay something for it. Do you remember when film cost money? How you always thought twice before snapping? And today you just click away, hoping that one in a hundred of your pictures turn out well (I'm a lousy photographer). Imagine paying $1 for every picture, just so others won't be allowed to copy it. I'm opposed to this suggestion.

For the record, I am 100% behind all of the other recommendations.

You don't have to individually copyright words, pages, or chapters of a book. You just copyright the whole entirety of the book.Why can't the copyright system work similarly?aka you copyright the contents of your blog/website in one swoop as one copyright. Then that's that.

Another issue with such a reform is the issue of moral rights for authors. Much of the Berne Convention implicitly accepts these as a given, and in a number of European countries these are a foundation of the copyright system. As can be seen in many of the previous posts, such as awarnock's or mcherm's, for authors and artists there is usually some conception that they have some rights over their own works regardless of the law (I would say as a matter of courtesy, but my personal views are not really relevant). Moral rights imply in particular automatic lifetime copyright, given that by definition they consist of the rights an author ought to have (by some definition of "ought") over his or her own works. ....snip then)[/quote]

Fine. I can live with that. However.....the addendum to this is that the copyright is not transferable and the copyright ceases to exist upon the death of the author/creator. This means that copyright over a work can only be granted to a living live human being, not a corporation. Should the author choose to license or sell his product then that's fine. But I refuse to allow corporations to have perpetual copyright.

US should go back to old 14+14. 28 years is more than enough time to make your cash off of a work. Past that if it's something that people still care about to use/have around it is essentially part of culture.

All of these suggestions make way too much sense which means they will never be enacted. There are always special interests that have benefited from the status quo and have been investing in Congress for years to maintain the status quo.